Swedish Ballets

The Swedish Ballets are a company of ballet installed with Paris of 1920 with 1925 with the Théâtre of the Fields-Élysées, under the direction of an impassioned industrialist of dance, Rolf de Maré.

They were born from the separation of Michel Fokine from with the Russian Ballets of Serge de Diaghilev and try to offir with the public of Paris a diversity and a richness undoubtedly less impressive than the repertory of the Russian Ballet, but nevertheless quite as innovative, under the impulse of its choreographer Jean Börlin.

Working with librettists like Paul Claudel, Luigi Pirandello, Pär Lagerkvist, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia and Jean Cocteau, the Swedish Ballets are a genuine literary window of the time. Rolf de Maré orders the musics of the ballets with Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc and even Cole Porter, which will compose one of the first “ballets jazz” of the history: Within the Quota (1923), with an orchestration of Charles Koechlin. The same season, the Swedish Ballets present the Creation of world of Darius Milhaud, decorations of Fernand Leger.

The greatest success of the Swedish Ballets is undoubtedly the Merchant of birds of Germaine Tailleferre, which was programmed more than three hundred times during three seasons and whose opening was taken again by Serge de Diaghilev for the intervals of the Russian Ballet.

At the time of the ballet Slackening of Erik Satie, Rene Clair makes the film Entracte .

As for the decorations and costumes, they are the work of painters like Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Colin, Pierre Bonnard, and especially Fernand Leger.

In four years, Jean Börlin sign 24 choreographies, of which several will be misunderstood of the public, so much it calls in question the definition even of the dance. The critics even reproach him not “for dancing”. But this new philosophy will be integrated in the current of the modern Danse a few years later.

See too

royal Ballet Swedish

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